Fail here there and everywhere

[sqbr]

I am feeling sick and grumpy but also chatty. So, some links from metafandom with rambly commentary.

Failboat! The Cruise Ship of the Damned Sails On summarises a bunch of stuff.

veejane asks what sff fandom is going to do about this crap.

On safe spaces talks about, well, safe spaces.

Re the Will Shetterly/Kathyryn Cramer vs coffeeandink thing(*): outing someone under their real name because they disagreed with you and banned you from their lj? Is unbelievably low. Dismissing the opinions of everyone who disagrees with you "because all their IPs come from Ivy league colleges"? Low and stupid. Arguing against the use of pseudonyms on the internet? Just..argh. The stupid burns.

Also, given that Worldcon is in Australia next year I find myself putting together my opinions on aussie fandom with all this stuff going on in international fandom. I feel a bit stymied about what I can do personally to try to cut down on the fail, though, apart from trying not to contribute to it myself and encouraging anti-fail.

So since coffeeandink asked people to focus on positive things: I am currently reading "Devil in Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley after being recced it on 50books_poc. It is quite good, even if it's not spec fic :)

(*)People are avoiding saying their names because apparently they google stalk and harrass them, but if NOONE says their names noone will know whose been talked about. I feel too obscure to be worried, but incase they do: seriously, you're going to pick on a no-name australian rambling while sick? This will not help your PR.

Comments

Part 1 (went past character limit!)

[alias_sqbr]

But you are right, it is has become less about race per se and more about community mores and power structures and individual people behaving like arseholes.

We don't agree, we have opposite povs: you've said it's a debate, but not about race. I think it's about race, but not a debate. Various people have tried to derail it into not being about race, and some of those attempts were so reprehensible as to deserve special notice, but there is still a strong discussion about racism going on right now. That's the whole purpose of fight_derailing.

I think we can certainly both agree that it is a clusterfuck of bad behaviour that hasn't been particularly useful to anyone

No. I think it has overall been a bad thing (thus "fail"), but some very worthwhile things have come out of the wreckage. (Again, see fight_derailing, as well as verb_noire)

let Australian debates about race in fandom go on without being derailed by its continuing debates about the actions of individuals in US fandom.

Where has this happened? All I've seen is discussions of race in international fandom inspire australian discussions of race. And as delux_vivens pointed out, while the particular discussions of racism at cons are almost all about America, many of the participants of RaceFail09 are not American.

And the behaviours I've seen in RaceFail09, and all the previous similar discussions in international fanfic fandom (this is part of a continuuing pattern, not just a few individuals) have been exactly the same as the stuff I see in aussie fandom. One of the reasons I'm a bit impatient with your arguments is I have seen them all a hundred times before, including the tactic of saying that any analysis based on american discussions is flawed and irrelevant to aussie/english fandom in the face of the opinions of aussie/english POC.

Why should we totally reinvent the wheel?

You may be right about Worldcon, I can't say. I thought I'd ask the question and see what people who've been there have to say. But I'm not saying we should discuss RaceFail09 stuff there specifically, I'm saying we should avoid making the same mistakes while discussing stuff like Cultural Appropriation/safe spaces etc.